"The internet, Web, Cloud, these are essentially disruptive global constructs for many of us. The atoms that serve as infrastructure for these global constructs are physically located in specific countries; the laws & regulations that govern the industries disrupted by these constructs are themselves usually national in structure; the firms doing the disrupting are quasi-stateless in character, trying…to be “global”; emerging & future generations have worldviews that are becoming more & more AmazonBay, discarding the national middle for edges of global & hyperlocal.

We are all so steeped in national structures for every aspect of this: the law, governance model, access & delivery technologies, ways of doing business — that we’re missing the point.

Everything is becoming more stateless, more global. We don’t know how to deal with it. So we’re all trying very hard to put genies back in bottles, pave cowpaths, turn back waves, all with the same result.

"The top-down, test-driven, corporate-styled “accountability” movement -- featuring prescriptive state standards -- has already done incalculable damage to our children’s classrooms, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Just ask a teacher. It’s no coincidence that the most enthusiastic proponents of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, etc., tend to be those who know the least about how kids learn. And now they’re telling us that a single group of people should shape the goals and curriculum of every public school in the country.

What they don’t understand is that uniformity isn’t the same thing as excellence; high standards don’t require common standards. And neither does uniformity promote equity. One-size-fits-all instructional demands actually offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the cause of genuine equity."

[...When I mentioned that NJ taxes have bought some of the best public schools in the country, he scoffed.] "One thing that's funny is that the next day there was a post on Flypaper about the sad state of New Jersey's schools, which rank #2 on the unmodified CFSI score and #1 on the adjusted CSFI.

Beyond that, there is precious little movement in the top states based on this analysis: some middling states go down to low and some low go up to middling, but the top states, all in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, midwest or Virginia, are consistent.

Whatever this analysis is worth (and it may not be much), it is the kind of thing that makes me scratch my head about the steadily increasing Southern influence on education policy in Rhode Island and Providence. We keep pulling in more Southerners, who seem to have had some success in pulling their states from terrible to OK, but if we were just up to the level of our New England or Mid-Atlantic peers, we'd be way above Florida, Texas, etc."

"A blueprint for what could become the largest official bicycle route network in the world — in the end, it would span more than 50,000 miles in all 50 states — was approved last month by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. The project, under the leadership of the association’s task force on national bicycle routes, has been under development for four years. A primary member of the task force, the Adventure Cycling Association (the largest membership cycling group in North America), provided mapping and staffing support. The next step for the plan, which identifies corridors that connect urban, rural and suburban areas, is for individual states to decide exactly where routes should be placed within those corridors (www.adventurecycling.org/usbrs)."